The system Merit only harms the forum and stimulates competitors to create an alternative. I think you need to reward truly useful and quality posts, possible early grades, and not to freeze grade 90%, as happened in fact with the introduction of merit points.
What are you talking about? Are you mad? Merit system help the forum, makes it better day by day. Since it's launch, the system has performed well and demonstrated it's impacts on bitcointalk users, both lower- and higher-qualitied users to be more constructive.
Spammers seems to reduce posting spamming threads and might give up when they realize that they got nothing from spamming the forum. Account farmers feel hard to survive and keep their farm running. It is much more difficult for them to earn money from the forum.
This is not true. Spammers buy accounts with a high rank and continue on, and suffer all the others. With the introduction of the merit points the situation has not improved and everybody understands it.